"I can't believe it worked."
David stood on the bridge, one hand gripping the railing, the other pressed against his chest where his heart hammered wildly. The wind howled around him, carrying the scent of the sea below.
"They didn't kill me," he whispered, the words almost lost in the wind.
Most of what he'd said back there had been a bluff. If the boss had decided to kill him, that would have been it. No one would have ever known. All those threats about a recorded audio? Pure bluff. He didn't even know what was actually happening in the underground room he'd mentioned. In fact, everything he knew was just knowledge he'd come across by chance while working.
The locations he'd mentioned—Polen Avenue and Red District—were all he knew. He didn't even know what "the goods" actually were, though he'd guessed it was related to drugs. The underground floor was something a customer in a VIP booth had once mentioned in passing.
At that moment, facing the boss, he'd promised himself he wasn't going to lose the way he always did. So he'd taken a gamble—one that could have cost him his life, and still might if he wasn't careful.
"Twenty grand!" He laughed, the sound manic and disbelieving.
This was probably the first time in his life he'd had more than five hundred dollars to spend.
"But I still have to be careful," he muttered to himself.
Then something occurred to him.
"That's right—my phone." He slapped his forehead, remembering the missing phone incident. But that wasn't much of an issue now. He could afford to buy over a hundred phones and still have plenty left over.
"Wait."
As he stared out at the vast sea beyond, basking under the moonlight, something hit him—something that instantly evaporated all his joy.
"I gave him my GlobePay account..."
He fell silent for a long moment, his mind racing through the implications. Then his eyes widened in horror.
"What the hell did I just do?!"
David ran. He didn't stop for a moment, didn't slow down, just kept running until he finally reached his apartment building. His hands fumbled through his pockets and hoodie until he heard the familiar jingle of metal.
"My keys."
He pulled them out with shaking hands, jammed the key into the lock, twisted, and shoved the door open with a loud creak.
David went straight to the cupboard and pulled out the only piece of technology he had left in this house—his laptop. He flipped it open and waited as it booted up, each second feeling like an eternity. Thirty seconds. A minute. Finally, the desktop appeared.
He scrolled to his default browser and typed in the website address, but the moment he hit enter, he realized another problem.
"I don't have internet."
"Damn it!"
He grabbed the laptop and rushed back outside, slamming the door behind him. He ran to the next apartment—his direct neighbor—and knocked frantically.
No response.
He waited for what felt like ten minutes, then knocked again, more desperately this time.
Still nothing.
The man wasn't home yet. He was probably out having drinks with his coworkers. And even if David waited for him to come back, he'd likely be too drunk to be of any help.
"Damn it." David ran a hand through his hair and walked slowly back to his apartment. "What have I done?"
He slumped against his door, sliding down until he sat on the floor.
The reason he was so panicked was that he'd just remembered something crucial: the GlobePay account he'd used to receive the payment was one he'd created for a freelancing job he'd tried applying for last year. Due to the immense restrictions imposed on GlobePay by the government, they had retracted their services from this part of the country, and all accounts were supposed to be deactivated.
If the boss had sent the twenty thousand dollars to that GlobePay account, there were only two possibilities.
One: The bank had refused the transfer, and the payment had bounced back to the sender.
Two: The moment the money hit his account, the account got frozen, and the money was now stuck there.
Both possibilities were dreadful. But the first was worse—because he knew damn well that the moment he showed his face to that man again, he was going to die. Consequences be damned.
If it was the second possibility, then the money would be stuck there for a very long time. Possibly forever.
"How could I be so stupid?"
He leaned his head back against the door, staring at the ceiling.
At that moment when the boss had asked for his account details, for some reason David had decided against using his regular bank. There had been this gut feeling that told him something bad would happen if he did. So he'd opted for the next thing that came to mind.
But even while putting on a confident appearance, he'd actually been extremely anxious. He knew well enough how dangerous his boss was, and that one slip-up could be his ticket to the afterlife. In that fear, in that moment of panic masked by false bravado, he'd made a catastrophic mistake.
He'd given the details for his GlobePay account instead of his CashFest account.
"DAMN IT!"
David punched the wall beside him, pain shooting through his knuckles.
He'd just made a catastrophic blunder.
And there was nothing he could do about it until morning.